I just posted some photos from a couple short hikes on the Appalachian Trail in Pennsylvania during September 2003.
More Curious Cat Travels hiking photos: Grand Canyon National Park – Olympic National Park – Bull Run, Virginia – Yellowstone National Park – many more
Directory of travel photos by geographic locations
Excerpt from Idealized Design: How to Dissolve Tomorrow’s Crisis…Today by Russell L. Ackoff, Jason Magidson and Herbert J. Addison: How Bell Labs Imagined — and Created — the Telephone System of the Future in the 1950s.
Great stuff and another example showing the obsession with “new” ideas is wasteful.
A simple idea, and a powerful one too. Ackoff always presents his ideas very well, in this book, and in many articles by Dr. Ackoff available online. I still remember Dr. Ackoff’s presenting this material at a Hunter conference years ago – great stuff.
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From our post: Targets Distorting the System, Dr. Brian Joiner:
spoke of 3 ways to improve the figures: distort the data, distort the system and improve the system. Improving the system is the most difficult.
Another example of this in practice: Recount helps one university rise in the rankings [the broken link was removed]:
Behnke, who says he’s no fan of rankings, said he recently spoke to a provost at another institution who was capping class sizes at 19 to boost the “Classes Under 20” number.
I am sure “classes under 20” is a proxy for an intimate learning environment and interaction with knowledgeable professors that can teach well. You can’t directly measure the benefit of interaction with a professor in a small group on learning to create data to be used in ranking schools (Deming on unknown and unknowable figures). So classes with under 20 students and % of faculty with PhDs… are used as proxies for this idea.
If the proxy is the focus (as in school rankings) then distorting the system to create better looking data is a likely result. The purpose behind the action has great significance. If an institution desired to create a better learning environment and they used say a cause and effect diagram to find a group of problems and then determined one appropriate improvement step was to reduce class size (and perhaps another was to reduce the importance of tests and perhaps another was to provide professors training on effective teaching strategies) that a sensible path to improving the system.
401(k)s are a great retirement investment vehicle (for those in the USA). Since the introduction of 401(k)s they have proved very advantageous to those saving for their retirement. See our previous post on: Saving for Retirement.
However, the experience thusfar shows a weaknesses in the system. Many people don’t even take advantage of a 401(k) to save for their retirement. From a public policy perspective it creates a huge long term problem. The economy will end up with millions of people that didn’t save for retirement and will be a drain on those who did save for retirement and the rest of the economy.
So Congress actually passed a good revision to the law. Employers will now be required to default to having employees save for their retirement in 401(k) plans. The employee still has the option to decline doing so, but now, without such a choice, they will automatically save for retirement. Great news, if like me, you believe many who would have not saved for retirement now will, and that doing so will be a good move for them and for the overall economy.
Nice post on Root Cause Analysis:
Google provides video webcasts of speakers that present at Google [the broken link was removed]. These videos offer a great way to take part in one aspect of work at Googleplexs [the broken link was removed].
Customer Centric Web Decision Making [the broken link was removed] (videocast) by Avinash Kaushik (Occam’s Razor – his blog)
How can we better understand customers? [the broken link was removed] by Ely Dahan (related papers by him: The Predictive Power of Internet-Based Product Concept Testing Using Visual Depiction and Animation, The Virtual Customer)
More Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog post relating to customer focus.
Toyota’s Globalization Takes Shape through the Camry, speech by Gary Convis:
So true, see: New Rules for Management? No!. The desire to act as if we have new watersheds every year is misguided and is an ineffective view for managers. Managers should understand that the “new ideas” presented in magazines and books are very rarely new, see: (Quality and Innovation). Managers should study the great amount of excellent thought on management that has existed for decades and continues to be the best guidance. New twists on old ideas are worthwhile and the rare new good ideas are also great. But managers are better off if they understand the best old ideas and the they can incorporate new twists instead of just accepting a new superficial fad.
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Michael Crichton wrote an essay critical of the current patent law: This Essay Breaks the Law. I believe the US is making significant mistakes in how we are proceeding with the patent system, see: The Patent System Needs to be Significantly Improved.
A recent article from Money offers an interesting idea (to try anyway) for one part of the problem. Patent review goes Wiki
In our post on Manufacturing and the Economy we examined global manufacturing value added economic data. The World Bank has provided updated data, for 2002, which we provide below. In, Global Manufacturing Data by Country, we explored data from the United Nations through 2004 (on a related, but different, measure of manufacturing).
| Country | 1990 | 2001 | 2002 | 1990-2002% increase* |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| United States | 1,040,600 | 1,422,999 | 1,463,300 | 41 |
| Japan | 810,231 | 865,809 | 811,829 | 0 |
| China | 116,572 | 407,513 | No Data | 250 |
| Germany | 456,405 | 385,923 | 410,644 | -10 |
| United Kingdom | 206,718 | 220,429 | No Data | 7 |
| France | 228,270 | 217,534 | 192,279 | -16 |
| Italy | 247,914 | 203,248 | 216,177 | -13 |
| Korea | 64,604 | 117,575 | 129,449 | 100 |
| Mexico | 49,992 | 110,381 | 110,667 | 121 |
| India | 48,807 | 67,143 | 72,681 | 49 |
| World | 4,412,837 | 5,404,373 | 5,446,980 | 23 |
* 1990-2001 increase if no 2002 data available.
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Management a la Google [the broken link, wsj.com, was removed] by Gary Hamel
This short article makes some interesting points, definitely worth a read.
More blog posts on Google Management.
Books and articles by Gary Hamel.
Google Tech Talks – web videos of engineering talks at Google.
